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Thursday, April 5, 2018

MLK State Assassination 4/4/68

Mourners.

Travis sends this, which I copy and paste. There was a trial in 1999 and it was found that there was governmental ciulpability in the assassination of MLK, including eliminating his security deal, and moving him to the best room for a sniper, and fudging the ballistics tests to be inconclusive. They were conclusive that the weapon James Earl Ray had was not the murder weapon.

Remembering

Blacklisted trial: King vs. Jowers

MLK’s surviving family actively aided the appeals of James Earl Ray, never believing in his guilt.

The 1999 civil trial, King versus Jowers and Other Unknown Co-Conspirators included three and a half weeks of evidence. The Judge’s final charge: “Do you also find that others, including governmental agencies, were parties to this conspiracy as alleged by the defendant? Your answer to that one is also yes.”

The evidence included testimony that SCLC impersonators had stripped MLK of a standard security detail, and changed his Lorraine hotel room at the last minute to the vulnerable balcony location:

Of particular note is the testimony of Memphis Police Department homicide detective Captain Jerry Williams who had been in charge of organizing a unit of black officers that had previously provided protection for Dr. King on his visits to Memphis. Williams said that he was not asked to form his unit on Dr. King's final, fatal visit, and was later falsely informed that Dr. King's organization, the SCLC, had said Dr. King did not want protection.19 Additionally, as University of Massachusetts Professor Philip Melanson testified, MPD Inspector Sam Evans had ordered the emergency services' TACT 10 unit removed from the vicinity of the Lorraine Motel, claiming this too was done at the request of someone in the SCLC. As Pepper writes, “When pressed as to who actually made the request, he said that it was Reverend [Samuel] Kyles. The fact that Kyles had nothing to do with the SCLC, and no authority to request any such thing, seemed to have eluded Evans.”20

Not only had Dr. King been stripped of protection but a last-minute switching of his motel room had made the assassin's job all the easier. Former New York City police detective Leon Cohen testified that Lorraine Motel manager Walter Bailey told him on the morning after the assassination that Dr. King had originally been allocated a more secure courtyard room. But on the evening before his arrival, Bailey had received a call from someone claiming to be from the SCLC's Atlanta office requesting Dr. King be given a balcony room instead. Bailey said he was “adamantly” opposed to the change “because he had provided security by the inner court” but his caller had insisted the rooms be switched anyway.21 Needless to say, no genuine member of the SCLC is known to have made any such request.

The trial also demolished the ballistics evidence tying the found rifle to Ray:

Criminal Court Judge Joe Brown, who had presided over Ray's final appeal, took the stand to testify about a series of ballstics tests that he had ordered be performed on the Remington Gamemaster rifle found in the doorway of Canipe's. The FBI had never been able to establish that particular rifle as the murder weapon – supposedly because the bullet removed from Dr. King's body was too mutilated. Judge Brown, himself a ballistics expert, explained that 12 of the 18 bullets fired during his tests had contained a similar flaw – a bump on the surface – that was not present on the death slug. He also said that the rifle had never been sighted in and, as a result, had failed the FBI's accuracy test. “ ... based on the entirety of the record”, Brown said, “and the further ballistics tests I had run, it is my opinion this is not the murder weapon.”27

Frank Holloman was the Memphis Fire and Police Director at the time of MLK’s death — a former FBI veteran with 25 years of experience. He was the inspector in charge of Director J. Edgar Hoover’s Washington office for ten years. The last eight of Holloman’s FBI career coincided with the COINTEL program. As the Memphis Fire and Police Director, Holloman was responsible for the performance of the Memphis Police and the security they provided King while he was in the city.